• Never to hit the ball until you had decided exactly what you were trying to do.

• Never to attempt more than you could reasonably expect to achieve.

• Try your utmost on every shot.

This golf advice is applicable to every golfer, whether he scores in the sixties or the hundreds: three thoughts to serve as a basic text in any keen golfer’s approach to the game — something almost to write on the back of your glove or carry around the course on a prominent placard in your mind’s eye. Let’s look at the tenets individually.

Never hit the ball until you know what you are trying to do.

This really has two meanings. One obviously relates to summing up the shot in terms of distance, trajectory, ground and wind conditions, the lie of the ball, potential trouble areas, and so on. Thousands of golfers give insufficient attention to such matters. They simply grab a club and whale away almost blindly and wonder why, even when hitting the ball well, they never make a decent score.

Every golf hole and every golf shot requires thought. The better you can picture a given shot in your mind’s eye, and the clearer your mind is about the shot you intend to play, the greater your chance of accomplishing it. Even that simple lesson alone would substantially lower many handicaps.

But there is more than assessing the shot in knowing what you are trying to do at golf. You want to know not only what the ball should do, but what you yourself are trying to do to get the ball to behave in that way. You need to know, consciously, what you are trying to do with your swing.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a good swing, or an agricultural heave; if you have a single focal thought, you will have a better chance of making it work, not once in a while but repetitively. Repetition is the golden key to golf, and it usually starts with a repetitive thought pattern.

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